In designing speech applications, designers are confronted with many challenges because of multidisciplinary efforts involved in designing such applications. These efforts include the need for speech elements, business rules, interaction considerations, and other requirements. Because of diversity of these efforts, many stakeholders may be involved in the design process. For example, a speech application design team may compose of at least a user-interface designer, a grammar developer, a speech analyst, a project manager, an application developer, analysts, and other managers.
With the current design process, communications and coordination among different stakeholders on the design team may be difficult. Also, sharing information and work products among team members may become a challenge, because each member may update his or her own design while it is shared by other team members. Making new information and design available to other stakeholders in a productive manner has now become a priority in the design process. What is needed is a design framework that generates a speech application designer that is common to all stakeholders. In addition, the design framework should scale to the size of the design team and should be modifiable by different stakeholders. With a scalable, common, and modifiable design framework, time-to-market of speech applications may be minimized. Also with such framework, management capabilities and accountability may be increased and knowledge may be stored and reused by team members.